Multitude of strange problems

Ignition
1

I have recently experienced a multitude of strange problems with Ignition:

  1. Select tags refreshing from PLC at very slow rate (5 - 20 minutes), while others refresh at the default rate.
  2. Ghost clients. The status page displays 10 clients open, many with the same IP. I figured this could be due to the configuration of the specific PC, however I questioned this when paired with the other problems.
  3. In attempt to fix the tag problems I reset the gateway from the gateway control utility. After I did this the product became unlicensed.
  4. Clients display skewed images while before they displayed according to plan.

My next great problem solving idea was to restart the server, however I don’t know when this will be a feasible task, given that the system is in use.

Miscellaneous info:
Tried to “refresh browse” the PLC, with no noticeable effect.
Nothing out of the ordinary has been done with any of the PCs or server since the problems started happening.
Tags in question are indeed linked correctly.
Scan rate is at default (1 sec).
The server is not by any means bogged down.

I am at a loss.

2

  1. What version of Ignition are you running? What driver(s) are you using? Approximately how many total tags are there? Is there a lot of write activity to the PLC from Ignition?

  2. This is probably a known issue we are having with WMIC, a service provided by Windows that we use in the licensing. A fix is already in progress on that one.

3

  1. What version of Ignition? 7.1.8 (currently in late beta) has some improved handling of old sessions, including a manual way to purge them.

  2. Sounds like the client machine may be underpowered and/or the images may be large and resizing them takes a while?

4

I restarted the server and the licensing and ghost client problems have been resolved. The visual problems still remain, however I assume I’ll be able to fix that by adjusting the anchored/relative client settings. I assure you that the PCs in question can handle a client very adequately, if only for the evidence that they worked with ease up till now.

I am using the latest stable build of Ignition, version 7.1.7 (b6048). I have about 3000 tags, and the write time to the PLC remains low or idle until I open a new window at which time it may spike to ~ 70 changes/sec. The throughput remains low at about 3-4 scans/sec on the designer with every screen open. Let it be said that there are 3 clients running, but not in use, so the majority of the activity is coming solely from me.

5

Update:

In attempt to fix the problem I deleted the tags in question and recreated them. They now function properly, with the driven scan rate.

I suppose my problems have been resolved but I am a bit frightened of a system that I don’t know if I can trust to function properly. Could this have been an error created when importing/exporting tags? I am at a loss as to what could have caused these problems.

6

It’s looking like #1 may have been related to a deadband problem we solved in another thread.